Critical social theorists and power at work

This chapter examines the place of work in twentieth-century critical social theory, focusing on how work is understood in relation to social power and the possibility of emancipation. The first section centers on the Frankfurt School. First-generation Frankfurt philosophers conducted classical, Marx-inspired analyses of work as a key factor in economic exploitation and social stratification. They also developed original, long-historical, and anthropological perspectives that located the roots of social domination in the human necessity to work. This section concludes with a discussion of Axel Honneth, who significantly renewed analyses of power and emancipatory struggles by advancing a new model based on the notion of recognition. The second section turns to the post-Nietzschean approach of Michel Foucault, showing that work figures centrally across the major phases of his thought. While his disciplinary and biopolitical frameworks emphasized mechanisms of social domination, his later writings acknowledged the possibilities of individual agency.